Change the default font when using publisher font?

[ATimson]

There are some books where publisher fonts are used for only some content, and the bulk of the book has an unspecified font. It looks like the Kindle - or at least the Paperwhite 2 - will default to Helvetica in that case.

Is there any way to change that default? I can turn off publisher font, or rip the books apart if I really need to, but I'd rather just change the fallback be Baskerville, or at least something with serifs, if possible.

[NiLuJe]

@ATimson: Technically, you can with the Fonts Hack, although, if it's falling back to Helvetica or Futura, it is strongly discouraged to override this family (sans), because it's used basically everywhere in the UI, and there's a very high chance that bad things *will* happen if you don't take precautions (like never rebooting w/ a sans override, never switching to USBMS w/ a sans override, preferably doing it with an FT override active, and w/ a shell open in case things go boom, so, not terribly safe or practical).

A much safer solution is to fix the CSS of the affected books w/ Calibre.

[shamanNS]

It's a known bug for KF8 books read on PW1 and PW2. If book uses some embedded fonts only for things like headings and font-family is not declared for body (nor paragraph) CSS class, PW1 and PW2 fallback to Helvetica/sans serif instead to Caecilia/default serif font.

So you must edit ebook file to add body {font-family: serif;}, that fixes the problem. That was font related bug #1

Font related bug #2 that also relates to body and p tag CSS code is the one where the book gets stuck with Caecilia font and changing to another built-in font in Aa menu does nothing. That is what you get when there is no font-family for body and p tags CSS contains crap like "Times" (or any other referenced but not embedded font family) or even just font-family: serif;.

Conclusion: always define book's default font in body tag

Maybe it would be possible to use Font Override part of @NiLuJe's font hack to temporarily override sans serif font with a serif one, while you are reading problematic book, and that way to avoid having to edit the ebook file itself. But you should probably just stick to editing files. It easier and safer option.

EDIT: I'm to slow.

[ATimson]

Thanks, both of you. What I figured, if not what I was hoping for. Silly publishers.

[JSWolf]

Simon and Shuster put the font family classes in all the CSS declarations that use them; none in body.

[NiLuJe]

@shamanNS: Thanks for the writeup on the CSS tweaks needed, I was way too lazy to research those .

[shamanNS]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Simon and Shuster put the font family classes in all the CSS declarations that use them; none in body.

Simon and Shuster should read KDP formatting guide :-D

[NiLuJe]

Oookay. Weird twist: The Code2000 override that I recently added to the Fonts Hacks worksaround this bug (the font used to override Code200 is used instead of Helvetica).

Huh.

While new & relatively untested, it should be mostly safe, but it's obviously only applicable if you don't actually rely on a wide unicode coverage and/or complex script layout.

That said, I'm looking into 'fixing' this in a less intrusive (& relatively safe) way, now that I managed to reproduce a testcase (thanks, ShamanNS ;p).

EDIT: Nope, didn't manage to do it in a better way. So, yep, the Code2000 override does the trick without touching the UI (and thus *should* be mostly safe).